QoS-based resource management for ambient intelligence

Future homes will probably be equipped with in-home networks, combining a backbone of wired networks and a large number of devices connected through wireless links, to provide a responsive and supportive environment, known as Ambient Intelligence. Many of the applications provided to the user lean heavily on media processing and streaming data. Therefore it is expected that consumer terminals will play an important role in providing new experiences to the users. Most of the devices have to be very cost and power effective, while digital media processing is able to consume all the resources a device can offer, and more. Typically, the number of applications and the resource needs of the applications change over time. To adapt to these variations, applications have the ability to trade resource usage for quality of service (QoS). QoS based resource management enables these tradeoffs in resource-constrained systems. In this paper we present our QoS approach, and we explore an integrated approach that addresses terminal and network resources, and takes power issues into account.